Presentation Schedule
The Geospatial Open Building Stack (GOBS) project represents a crucial national effort to establish a foundational Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) by solving India’s massive urban data gap. Historically, planning has been handicapped by slow, expensive manual surveys and obsolete records. GOBS overcomes this by using AI and satellite imagery to create a dynamic, unified, 2.5D inventory dataset of over ~180 million buildings across the entire country. This shift allows the data to function as a public good, similar to UPI, enabling validation and continuous refinement. The core value lies in the actionable insights this DPI unlocks, transforming governance from reactive to proactive. Key use cases may include creating validated energy baselines for Energy Efficiency programs, precisely identifying rooftops for Solar Energy Potential, and guiding adaptation strategies for Climate Resilience against heat and floods. GOBS moves beyond academic modeling; it is a vital step toward providing the digitally validated, transparent, and recent data infrastructure necessary for India’s sustainable urbanization.
India’s building and infrastructure sectors are at an inflection point where sustainability, resilience, and growth must move in lockstep. With rapid urbanisation, surging energy demand, rising heat stress, and investor interest in climate-aligned assets, the built environment can become a powerful lever for decarbonisation and inclusive development. In this hybrid session, Ms. Mili Majumdar will outline how sustainability, innovation, and finance intersect across the building lifecycle—from design and construction through operations and performance disclosure. She will explore performance-based and blended financing, risk-mitigation instruments, and policy enablers that unlock capital for both new builds and deep retrofits, including affordable and mid-income housing. The talk will spotlight data-driven accountability tools (e.g., rating systems and performance platforms), procurement approaches that recognise lifecycle and embodied carbon, and technology/business-model advances that scale results without sacrificing occupant comfort or developer returns. A fireside chat with Dr. Satish Kumar will translate these themes into practical strategies for bridging the gap between capital and climate action in India’s built environment, focusing on what governments, financiers, developers, and civil society can do—together—to move markets faster and at lower risk.
India’s journey toward Viksit Bharat 2047 and Net Zero 2070 calls for more than ambition; it demands action and delivery. As the country advances toward sustainable industrial growth, the focus is shifting from vision to implementation, with a focus on scaling domestic manufacturing, accelerating clean technology innovation, and aligning business and policy strategies to make tangible progress.
This industry-focused session brings together leaders from business, development agencies, and think tanks to reflect on how ready India’s industrial ecosystem is to design, manufacture, and deliver climate-smart and energy-efficient technologies at scale. The discussion will explore the current readiness of industries to meet domestic and global demand, identify critical gaps across manufacturing, R&D, and skills, and highlight practical pathways for collaboration. Panellists will also discuss how policy, innovation, and private sector action can converge to build energy-efficient manufacturing, strengthen supply chains, and build a self-reliant and future-ready manufacturing base that drives India’s sustainable growth story.
The building and construction sector in India accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s total energy consumption and a significant share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With rapid urbanization, the sector is projected to double its built-up area by 2030, leading to a sharp rise in material use, construction activity, and operational energy demand. Consequently, addressing both embodied and operational carbon emissions has become central to India’s pathway toward achieving its net-zero emissions target by 2070. To address this need, Saint-Gobain Research India (SGRI) and the Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE) initiated the project “Development of an Integrated Carbon Assessment Framework (Embodied & Operational) for Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Buildings.” The first phase established a unified framework to assess whole life carbon emissions and demonstrated its application through a pilot case study, integrating both embodied and operational carbon accounting. Building on this foundation, the next phase focuses on a parametric analysis to evaluate how design and material parameters—such as building typology, wall and window materials, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), and climatic conditions—influence whole life carbon outcomes. By integrating simulation modeling with life cycle assessment, this phase aims to generate data-driven insights that support evidence-based, low-carbon design decisions for India’s evolving building sector.
Join science journalist and author Anil Ananthaswamy in exploring the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence. Drawing from his books The Man Who Wasn’t There and Why Machines Learn, we’ll examine how the human self emerges and fragments, its relation to consciousness, the mathematics underlying AI, and whether machines learn like we do. We’ll also discuss the energy costs of artificial intelligence and how transforming human behavior—not just technology—may be essential to addressing climate change. A thought-provoking dialogue on intelligence, selfhood, and our collective future.
As Indian cities urbanize and cooling demand surges, District Cooling Systems (DCS) offer a transformative solution to deliver comfort efficiently and sustainably. By centralizing chilled water supply to multiple buildings, DCS can reduce energy use, refrigerant emissions, and peak electricity loads. The integration of natural refrigerants further strengthens their low-carbon profile.
Despite these advantages, DCS deployment in India remains limited due to regulatory gaps, unclear risk-sharing, fragmented institutional coordination, and a small pool of bankable projects. Establishing a dedicated DCS regulator and enabling institutional mechanisms can address these barriers, defining fair tariffs, technical standards, and consumer safeguards while aggregating demand and standardising project models.
This session will delve into actionable pathways for establishing robust regulatory and institutional frameworks, replicable PPP models, and scaling mechanisms that can build investor confidence, unlock concessional finance, and position district cooling as a key pillar of India’s sustainable urban and energy transition.
Collaboration between government institutions and civil society is vital for ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. Equitable energy transition at its core is aimed at addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change and ensuring that the benefits are shared by all. Embedding equity as a key element in energy transition strategy is important an enabler for building climate resilience of vulnerable communities. Clean technology adoption is an opportunity for improving living situation and livelihood for socio economically disabled groups. The National, State, and Local Governments (LSGs)—including cities, municipalities, and gram panchayats, have an important role to play in energy transition. In particular, the Local Government serve as the primary interface with the local communities and have a huge role to play in reaching the beneficiaries for equitable energy transition. LSGs need strategic interventions and supportive partnerships to embed equity considerations into their energy transition efforts. This session will focus on synergetic partnerships allow for a more holistic approach for addressing societal needs for energy transition.
India is on the cusp of building a sustainability-linked employment ecosystem so that talent pipelines seamlessly meet hiring systems. The New Education Policy envisages the integration of climate skills into mainstream university curricula.
Jobs, going ahead, will acquire different shades of ‘green’ quotient. This will require engineers, architects, policy experts, and innovators to work together in this developing ecosystem.
Over time, ‘Green Skills’ will become ubiquitous across all job profiles. How do we ensure that students and young professionals are not left behind, but rather at the centre of this transformation? This session will spotlight pathways to green employment, practical insights from industry leaders, and inspirational stories of how young people are creating impact.
The electricity requirement and peak demand in India are increasing rapidly due to rapid urbanization, improved economic conditions, and increasing ownership of electrical appliances. To meet India’s electricity demand sustainably, India aims to attain 500 GW of total installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy sources by 2030. The majority of clean energy added to the grid will come from variable renewable power plants, with a > 50 percent share in the generation mix by 2029-30. As renewable generation is primarily dependent on weather conditions and usually does not align with the peak of electricity demand, a high share in the generation mix can create a potential supply-demand mismatch, causing grid imbalance or unpredictable price fluctuation.
In this scenario, demand flexibility (DF) can aid in shaping demand profiles to better match generation profiles by allowing electricity demand to respond strategically to grid conditions enabled through technological and incentive tools. DF can facilitate DISCOMs to integrate higher renewables and manage demand, thus providing customers affordable and reliable power quality and reducing the fossil-based electricity generation requirement.
GW-scale programs on-demand flexibility exists worldwide and directly contributes to improved grid stability, faster integration of renewable energy, and notable economic savings. The session, through examples and experience sharing, will examine business models that Indian DISCOMs should consider, brief updates on ongoing work in different states, and how industry partners are working on the appliances side to incorporate demand flexibility into state DISCOM resource adequacy plans.